For VOIP solutions that often come with the "don't call 911 it won't work" caveat. That isn't good enough. In fact, maybe the FCC should take the position that mishandling these calls by VoIP systems is equivalent to blocking/impeding them. E.g. its bad practice (and I think illegal) for a cell phone to be inoperable for emergency calls while locked.
They may not be able to dial you back if your call gets disconnected, on account of your phone not having a phone number. I'm not sure how that works.
I have an ObiHai box at home that lets me use Google Voice as a my landline VoIP provider for free. However, I still have to pay a second SIP provider about $15/year just for 911 access.
"How much cheaper would buses be if they didn't need to be wheel-chair accessible? Surely 99% of people don't have wheel-chairs."
"Our nuclear power plant is designed to withstand a 10M tsunami, nearly all of the earthquakes and tsunamis in the past hundred years have been smaller than that."
If buses would be so much cheaper that special wheel-chair accessible vans could be provided instead then maybe that's a case that should be shrugged-off.
Are you really surprised or are you just expressing outrage that other people make different tradeoffs than you do?
Even in the nuclear power plant case you mention it's not obvious that it would be better to design every nuclear power plant to withstand disasters that have not occurred in the past one hundred years especially if the alternative is, e.g. a coal-fired power plant.
"Shrugged off" implies that problems that don't apply to you personally are not important, and that attitude or even its apparent presence cause a huge chunk of the world's problems at root...
If the solutions were easy, they would have been figured out by now. We live in a highly engineered world but people constantly ignore all nuance.
Another example I saw recently was this crazy outrage that Whole Foods was selling pre-peeled oranges in plastic containers. They were contacting corporate offices and trying to shame WF for their waste. Nobody stopped to think that maybe people have different levels of manual dexterity and that the elderly or disabled people might enjoy a fresh orange too.
Nearly all of the challenge in design lies in the corner case.
No, it shouldn't. This is the problem with just saying 'the market will fix it'. The market will fix it for rich white able-bodied men and basically nobody else.
In a large company, you want physical security to know when there's an emergency. They can usually get to the scene much, much quicker, and will need to let emergency services into the building anyway.
With landline corporate phones, they can be configured so that if the user direct dials 911, they can flag the extension and flash an alarm in the security office. Hotels often have a similar setup. (Avaya calls it "On-Site Notification", Cisco calls it "Cisco Emergency Responder".)
If employees/guests are direct dialing 911 from a cell phone, building security has no idea what's going on.
Further, the parent comment is ignoring certain companies and agencies that explicitly prohibit cell phones on site.